Why Teach Students About Agriculture?

With low-cost food supplies and urban bias, is it any wonder that affluent consumers don't understand the food supply each year in its entirety, and expanding it further for the nearly 80 million mouths that are born into this world each year? — The late Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize winner (1970), wheat breeder and former professor, Texas A&M University, in a 2001 speech at Tuskegee University.

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The Colorado Literacy Project will take place during from March through May this year. The Colorado Literacy Project provides an opportunity for students to meet farmers and ranchers as they read to students in kindergarten through fifth grades. This year each student will get to take home one of the publications.

We need one person from the school to be the contact to coordinate with the teachers in the school and the farmers and ranchers.

Two books will be available to use. The first is Colorado Critters. Through this poem, students will learn about animals, both domestic and wild, found on Colorado farms and ranches. This book is appropriate for kindergarten through second grades.

A second book is The Faces of Colorado Agricutlure. Students will learn about three families involved in agriculture. This book is appropriate for third through fifth grades.

Oil and gas drilling began in Colorado in the 1860s. This reader explains where oil and gas comes from, how it is extracted and how we use it. Each person in Colorado uses about 280,000,000 BTUs each year. This reader shows where gas and oil is found in Colorado and provides a brief histoy of the development of these natural resources.

Cattle ranching can be described as “the year-round care of cows and bulls to produce calves to raise and sell,” but it’s really much more. Ranchers must also be stewards of the land, caring for soils, grasses, other plants, water and wildlife habitat. Explore the history of ranching in Colorado, the ranching time-line, and ranching today. Put a pencil to paper to see if you can figure out the carrying capacity of the land.

The State of Colorado is the second largest land owner in Colorado. (First is the Federal Government.) These lands were given to the state to generate money to support Colorado's schools and other state institutions. These reader explores what a trust is, how state trust lands are used to generate income, how these funds are used, locations of state trust lands and what goes into being good stewards of this land.